When I read this from David Brooks’s most recent column:
For most of television history, sitcoms have been about families. From “The Dick Van Dyke Show†to “All in the Family†to “The Cosby Show,†TV shows have generally featured husbands and wives, parents and kids.
my immediate reaction was “Huh?” Has David Brooks ever watched The Dick Van Dyke Show? Unlike its rough contemporaries, Leave It to Beaver or The Donna Reed Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show was the epitome of the “flock” motif of which Brooks takes note:
Today’s shows are often about groups of unrelated friends who have the time to lounge around apartments, coffee shops and workplaces exchanging witticisms about each other and the passing scene.
Laura Petrie, unlike June Cleaver or Donna Stone, was a former entertainer who fit right in with Rob’s work associates and an episode was just as likely to deal mostly with Rob, Buddy, Sally, Mel, and Alan as it was with Laura and Richie appeared in fewer than half of the 158 episodes of the program.
How does The Andy Griffith Show with its cast of Mayberry characters fit into Brooks’s paradigm? And I seem to recall that the earlier You’ll Never Get Rich AKA The Phil Silvers Show exclusively featured a cast of unrelated friends who exchanged witticisms.
I don’t find the current crop of sitcoms particularly appealing, gave up on Seinfeld after struggling through a half dozen episodes, have never watched an episode of Friends, and only watched one episode of How I Met Your Mother to keep my niece company. What strikes me about many of the programs of today is how idle so many of the sitcom characters seem to be. Maybe that’s the social change that David Brooks should have honed in on.
Sure, there are still workplace comedies, the most obvious being The Office, but work doesn’t seem nearly as central to the identity of today’s crop of sitcom characters as in those of days gone by. We still remember that Ralph Kramden was a bus driver and his pal Norton worked in the sewer, that Alex Stone was a physician, Andy the sheriff of Mayberry, Rob Petrie a comedy writer. Ward Cleaver, on the other hand, was always a mystery. He worked but we were never sure at just what. I always suspected he was a Soviet agent.
I don’t know. I think idleness, especially idleness on the job, is more a permanent fixture of comedy than anything else. You never actually see Ralph or Norton at work in the Honeymooners, and of course Lucy Ricardo’s time was generally spent rather idly as well.
Meanwhile, I can’t speak for Friends – I could never stand it – but one of Seinfeld’s central plotlines was George’s course of employment with the Yankees, as well as Elaine’s with Pendant Publishing and J. Peterman. And everyone knows that Homer Simpson “works” at a nuclear power plant. Among more recent sitcoms, Arrested Development, Parks and Recreation, and Scrubs are all set at least partially at the workplace.
If anything’s changed, I think it’s the fact that people now switch careers more often, and more work is both white collar and increasingly vague in terms of expectations.
First of all, Laura Petrie was so hot.
Setting that aside, conservatives never, ever get current culture. The instant you see a conservative writing about any cultural phenomenon more recent than Elvis, avert your gaze out of a decent concern for their inevitable embarrassment.
The big new hit sitcom, Modern Family is all about family. So is The Middle and, in a very different way, Two and a Half Men.
Community is set in a community college, Big Bang Theory is at a university, while Parks and Rec, The Office, and others are set in the workplace.
So neither theory holds up.
And don’t forget that there is a whole category of “dramedy,” most of which, like Bones, are intensely work-focused.
I’ll second that Modern Family and the Middle are two good sitcoms about family.